In February and March 2025, Dr. Ian Marder (Associate Professor in Criminology, Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology) gave a number of presentations to practitioners and policymakers in different countries.
On 21 February, Ian was invited to present at the Europol conference, Fundamental rights at the heart of policing, taking place in The Hague. As part of a panel on community policing, Ian spoke about how restorative practices can help police officers engage with communities in ways that repair harm, build relationships and are experienced as meaningful both by police officers and by the communities themselves.
One project Ian discussed, involving the facilitation of dialogue between police officers and young Black adults in Blanchardstown, has been published in Policing and Society here.
On 7 March, Ian presented at the Department of Justice in Dublin at a conference entitled: Data as a driver: Informing criminal justice policy and practice with evidence. There, he discussed the process by which the project Restorative Justice: Strategies for Change engaged with a range of policymakers and practitioners to co-design and conduct a study, before collaborating to use the findings to develop a new policy paper on expanding funding for restorative justice.
Learn more about Restorative Justice: Strategies for Change at www.restorativejustice.ie. Ian wrote an article outlining the findings of the study about which he spoke, which was published open access in the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice here.
Finally, on 14 March, Ian was invited to speak at a webinar organised by the Research Committee of the Probation Institute in the UK. There, he spoke to probation practitioners and researchers about the use of restorative justice pre- and post-sentence and the role of probation officers in facilitating that.